Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Poster Boys

By Maria Bustillos November 2, 2011 9:00 pmNovember 2, 2011 9:00 pm

Townies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities.

Hollywood is full of weird little jobs. You see some of them on the credits at the end of the movie: Gaffer, Best Boy. In a lot of cases, the people in those mysterious-sounding occupations seem to get there by mistake, side-tracked en route to some other career. In fact, Los Angeles is chockablock with talented people who wound up in an entirely different profession from the one they’d originally started out in. I know painters who became art directors and set designers, a singer who started life as an actress and screenwriter. Two would-be novelists who both ended up film editors, though one of them eventually quit to become a yoga teacher.

I’ve been through a number of incarnations myself; I was private secretary to a screenwriter, and then to a celebrity gynecologist. I co-founded a tchotchke business in the ’80s, acting variously as designer, product developer, bookkeeper, general dogsbody, and, in frequent dashes to New York, marketer and party planner. In the ’90s, I sold that business and rode the entrepreneurial roller coaster that was the Internet 1.0. After the first dot-com bubble burst, I revived the ambition of my youth and became a writer.

I’ve sometimes wondered whether the peripatetic career path common in Los Angeles might be partly responsible for the high quality of the entertainment produced here. This city is full of people who have been around the tree; they’re skilled improvisers, quick studies, curious, game for anything.

This city is full of people who are skilled improvisers, quick studies, curious, game for anything.

One of the best examples of this phenomenon I know is Richard Goldman. He writes taglines for a living, those evocative, compact phrases that appear on movie and TV posters. For example, from “Closer”: “If you believe in love at first sight, you never stop looking.”

Richard, a wry East Coast transplant, is an old friend. Our kids went to school together. His first love was music; he’s a talented songwriter who still performs at local clubs now and then. Back when I worked in design, he was writing game shows and TV scripts. On many a balmy evening, while the kids played Ping-Pong in the backyard, Richard would be springing ridiculous puns on us grown-ups over cocktails. The moment I learned he had a new gig copywriting I knew he’d be a perfect fit for it; his conversation consists primarily of bons mots to begin with.

A movie is commonly associated with a single visual image for marketing purposes, and that image is called key art. It’s what you see on DVD or CD cases, the sides of buildings and bus stops and seemingly on the inner walls of your own skull, for those few weeks before the film opens. An enormous amount of talent goes into making this image, and into writing the copy that goes with it.

This kind of copywriting is a whole job on its own; technically Richard is a “theatrical print copywriter,” and a highly regarded one. He was nominated for a Key Art Award, the Oscar of the Hollywood print world, for that “Closer” line.

I’ve always wanted to learn more about Richard’s job, so we arranged to repair to Culver City one warm, breezy afternoon to have coffee and talk with his fellow copywriter, David Saltzman. The two became friends over a tag line. The subject was “Surf’s Up,” an animated movie featuring penguins; the client wanted the word “ocean” in the line. Both Richard and David came up independently with the line that would eventually appear on the poster: “A Major Ocean Picture.”

Many of these copywriters work at home, they told me. They sign all these nondisclosure agreements, and then they are given a script, or a TV show or movie to watch. Sometimes a courier delivers the DVD and then picks it up as soon as the copywriter is done watching. Then they go into the office or hop onto a conference call for a kickoff meeting.

“The A.E., the account executive, is the person who is on the phone with the client, the studio marketing executive,” David explained. “The A.E. tells us what we’re doing, maybe explains a bit of the strategy, the creative direction. With TV especially, a big part of it is considering the brand, which is to say the channel. An ad for ABC Family is going to have a different tone from an ad for AMC or Bravo.”

For one prominent cable network, Richard told me, you can have no more than three words in the tagline. “If you go four or five words, that’s like a novel.”

“One word would be preferable,” David added. “Or no words.”

Related

The studio or TV network may have in-house staff working on the project, but it will also hire outside agencies to compete for the print work. If you win, part of the prize is financial. The other is “cachet, esteem,” David said, “the thrill of seeing your work in public,” on posters, billboards, buses.

Key art has a strange significance, even to a civilian. You’re living with these images the way you live with the songs on the radio; they form part of the texture of your daily life. Great key art can come to symbolize not just a movie but a time and place, a cultural mood: think of “Jaws,” “Silence of the Lambs,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Titanic,” “Pulp Fiction,” “American Beauty,” “West Side Story.” Chances are you’re picturing the poster image — the minnow-like swimmer above the shark’s teeth, the scarlet rose against a bare, equally velvety stomach.

Long after a movie opens and closes, the key art remains. Every time I’ve ever been in the office of a producer, director or actor, I’ve seen these images, lining a corridor or on a wall behind a desk. These people will have been two or three years making a project; it’s been such a big part of their lives for so long. And then it goes away and it’s not in their daily lives, and what is left is the poster. In this way, the image is like a trophy.

Richard brought what’s called “a copy exploration” to show me, from an early season of a popular cooking show. It’s a long, long list of lines. David, who has been Richard’s copy editor on and off for almost four years, began a critique.

“This is a perfect Richard line: ‘America’s Greatest Chefs: Haute and Heavy.’ I would say probably too inside, probably a little too smart. Too clever.” He moved down the list. “’There is Accounting For Taste.’ See, Richard’s very smart … it’s a great line, I like the line, I would submit the line … they might not use the line.”

“I might not put it on the first page,” Richard said. “Accounting … is not a good word, it’s a little lengthy.”

David continued. “‘The All-Stars Are Heating Up.’ There’s a sort of word-mining that I think we do, see, this is a cooking show. So you’ve got to get all your sauté, mix, burn, heat, flame, gas. ‘Now They Want the Whole Enchilada.'” We all laugh (and wince, a little bit) at that one.

“It’s never not fun to read Richard’s copy,” David said.

I asked them, of all the lines they’ve written, which is their favorite.

“Little Miss Sunshine,” David said. “I wrote the line that ended up on the poster. It was, ‘A Family on the Verge of a Breakdown.’ I didn’t know they were going to have the van on there, for the double meaning, I had written that line and it ended up being a nice part of the poster, it was very sweet and it had a good feel to it.”

Richard’s favorite was one he worked on with David for an ESPN documentary called “The Streak.” It was about a wrestling team that had never lost a match; it had “the longest running winning streak in the history of high school sports.” But “the tension was so unbelievable. If they lost they would be disgracing their grandparents. So my line was, ‘The more you win the more you have to lose.'”

I asked why that was his favorite.

“Because it’s NOT clever.”

David and I both tell him well, yes, it is clever.

“No, it’s truth! It’s true.”

“So truth trumps cleverness?”

“Absolutely.”

The apparent shallowness and glitz of Hollywood are often mocked, but it has always seemed to me that there is a ton of intelligence and passion that goes into making every bit of a Hollywood movie or TV show. Not just careerist passion but true, artistic passion. “Sometimes you feel you are writing an aphorism. Something that will last forever,” Richard told me. And I think that must be true.

My own favorite Hollywood line is one from “The Matrix”: “Reality is a thing of the past.” I’ve always been a hopeless science fiction geek, and I stood in line for ages to be among the first to see this movie. Like all the best taglines, it is surprisingly subtle for such a brief, seemingly glib remark. I’m not even sure whether the writer intended the meaning I’ve always attributed to it, namely, that reality can only be created from the materials of the past. It’s evocative of the changes in my own life, and in some ways, it’s a very Los Angeles message — simultaneously suggestive of impermanence and nostalgia, uncertainty and hope.

Oh and by the way, Richard supplied the title for this piece. “You had to expect I would go there,” he wrote. David and I chose it from a list that included:

COPY CATS
FOR THE PUN OF IT
UNDER FIVE WORDS
POSTERIZED
TAGGING: HOLLYWOOD STYLE

Maria Bustillos, the author of “Dorkismo” and “Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman,” writes frequently for The Awl.

What's Next

Townies, a series about life in New York — and occasionally other cities — written by the novelists, journalists and essayists who live there, appears on Thursdays. This week features an essay by Sandy SooHoo, a freelance photographer and writer who is working on a collection of essays.